As Is

I

“As is,” the auto dealer said, jamming his thumbs under his belt. “Two hundred fifty bucks and drive it away. I’m not pretending it’s perfect, but I got to tell you, you’re getting a damned good hunk of car for the price”

“ ‘As is,’ ” Sam Norton said.

“As is. Strictly as is.”

Norton let the point pass. He walked around the car again, giving it a close look from all angles. It was a smallish dark green four-door sedan, with the finish and trim in good condition, a decent set of tires, and a general glow that comes only when a car has been well cared for.

The test drive had been fine.

There was only one small thing wrong with it. The trunk didn’t open. It wasn’t just a case of a jammed lock, either; somebody had fixed this car so the trunk couldn’t open. With great care the previous owner had apparently welded the trunk shut; nothing was visible back there except a dim line to mark the place where the lid might once have lifted.

What the hell, though. The car was otherwise in fine shape, and he wasn’t in a position to be too picky. Overnight, practically, they had transferred him to the Los Angeles office, which was fine in terms of getting out of New York in the middle of a lousy winter, but not so good as far as his immediate finances went.

The company didn’t pay moving costs, only transportation; he had been handed four one-way tourist class tickets, and that was that. So he had put Ellen and the kids aboard the first jet to L.A., cashing in his own ticket so he could use the money for the moving job. He figured to do it the slow but cheap way: rent a U-Haul trailer, stuff the family belongings into it, and set out via turnpike for California, hoping that Ellen had found an apartment by the time he got there. Only he couldn’t trust his present clunker of a car to get him very far west of Parsippany, New Jersey, let alone through the Mojave Desert.

So here he was, trying to pick up an honest used job for about five hundred bucks, which was all he could afford to lay out on the spot.

And here was the man at the used car place offering him this very attractive vehicle—with its single peculiar defect—for only two and a half bills. Which would leave him with that much extra cash cushion for the expenses of his transcontinental journey. And he didn’t really need a trunk, driving alone. He could keep his suitcase on the back seat and stash everything else in the U-Haul. And it shouldn’t be all that hard to have some mechanic in L.A. cut the trunk open for him and get it working again.

On the other hand, Ellen was likely to chew him out for having bought a car that was sealed up that way; she had let him have it before on other “bargains” of that sort. On the third hand, the mystery of the sealed trunk appealed to him. Who knew what he’d find in there once he opened it up? Maybe the car had belonged to a smuggler who had had to hide a hot cargo fast, and the trunk was full of lovely golden ingots, or diamonds, or ninety-year-old cognac, which the smuggler had planned to reclaim a few weeks later, except that something unexpected had come up. On the fourth hand—

The dealer said, “How’d you like to take her out for another test spin, then?”

Norton shook his head. “Don’t think I need to. I’ve got a good idea of how she rides.”

“Well, then, let’s step into the office and close the deal.”

Sidestepping the maneuver, Norton said, “What year did you say she was?”

“Oh, about a ’64, ’65.”

“You aren’t sure?”

“You can’t really tell with these foreign jobs, sometimes, You know, they don’t change the model for five, six, ten years in a row, except In little ways that only an expert would notice. Take Volkswagen, for instance—”

“And I just realized,” Norton cut in, “that you never told ate what make she is, either.”

“Peugeot, maybe, or some kind of Fiat,” said the dealer hazily. “One of those kind.”

“You don’t know?”

A shrug. “Well, we checked a lot of the style books going back a few years, but there are so damn many of these foreign cars around, and some of them they import only a few thousand, and—well, so we couldn’t quite figure it out.”

Norton wondered how he was going to get spare parts for a car of unknown make and uncertain date. Then he realized that he was thinking of the car as his, already, even though the more he considered the deal, the less he liked it. And then he thought of those ingots in the trunk. The rare cognac. The suitcase full of rubies and sapphires.

He said, “Shouldn’t the registration say something about the year and make?”

The dealer shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Matter of fact, we don’t have the registration. But it’s perfectly legitimate. Hey, look, I’d like to get this car out of my lot, so maybe we call it two-twenty-five, huh?”

“It all sounds pretty mysterious. Where’d you get the car, anyway?”

“There was this little guy who brought it in, about a year ago, a year last November, I think it was. Give it a valve job, be said. I’ll be back in a month—got to take a sudden business trip. Paid in advance for tuneup and a month storage and everything. Wouldn’t you know that was the last we ever saw of him? Well, we stored his damn car here free for ten, eleven months, but that’s it, now we got to get it out of the place. The lawyer says we can take possession for the storage charge.”

“If I buy it, you give me a paper saying you had the right to sell it?”

“Sure. Sure.”

“And what about getting the registration? Shifting the insurance over from my old heap? All the red tape?”

“I’ll handle everything,” the dealer said. “Just you take the car outa here.”

“Two hundred,” Norton said. “As is.”

The dealer sighed. “It’s a deal. As is.”

A light snow was falling when Norton began his cross-country hegira three days later. It was an omen, but he was not sure what kind; he decided that the snow was intended as his last view of a dreary winter phenomenon he wouldn’t be seeing again, for a while. According to the Times, yesterday’s temperature range in L.A. had been 66 low, 79 high. Not bad for January.

He slouched down behind the wheel, let his foot rest lightly on the accelerator, and sped westward at a sane, sensible 45 mph. That was about as fast as he dared go with the bulky U-Haul trailing behind. He hadn’t had much experience driving with a trailer—he was a computer salesman, and computer salesmen don’t carry sample computers—but he got the hang of it pretty fast. You just had to remember that your vehicle was now a segmented organism, and make your turns accordingly.

God bless turnpikes, anyhow. Just drive on, straight and straight and straight, heading toward the land of the sunset with only a few gentle curves and half a dozen traffic lights along the way.

The snow thickened some. But the car responded beautifully, hugging the road, and the windshield wipers kept his view clear. He hadn’t expected to buy a foreign car for the trip at all; when he had set out, it was to get a good solid Plymouth of Chevvie, something heavy and sturdy to take him through the wide open spaces.

But he had no regrets about this smaller car. It had as much power and pickup as he needed, and with that trailer bouncing along behind him he wouldn’t have much use for all that extra horsepower, anyway.

He was in a cheerful, relaxed mood. The car seemed comforting and protective, a warm enclosing environment that would contain and shelter him through the thousands of miles ahead. He was still close enough to New York to be able to get Mozart on the radio, which was nice. The car’s heater worked well. There wasn’t much traffic. The snow itself, new and white and fluffy, was all the more beautiful for the knowledge that he was leaving it behind. He even enjoyed the solitude.

It would be restful, in a way, driving on and on through Ohio and Kansas and Colorado or Arizona or whatever states lay between him and Los Angeles. Five or six days of peace and quiet, no need to make small talk, no kids to amuse—

His frame of mind began to darken not long after he got on the. Pennsylvania Turnpike. If you have enough time to think, you will eventually think of the things you should have thought of before; and now, as he rolled through the thickening snow on this gray and silent afternoon, certain aspects of a trunkless car occurred to him that in his rush to get on the road he had succeeded in overlooking earlier. What about a tool kit, for instance? If he had a flat, what would be use for a jack and a wrench? That led him to a much more chilling thought: what would he use for a spare tire? A trunk was something more than a cavity back of the rear seat; in most cars it contained highly useful objects.

None of which he had with him.

None of which he had even thought about, until just this minute.

He contemplated the prospects of driving from coast to coast without a spare tire and without tools, and his mood of warm security evaporated abruptly. At the next exit, he decided, he’d hunt for a service station and pick up a tire, fast. There would be room for it on the back seat next to his luggage. And while he was at it, he might as well buy—

The U-Haul, he suddenly observed, was jackknifing around awkwardly in back, as though its wheels had just lost traction. A moment later the car was doing the same and he found himself moving laterally in a beautiful skid across an unsanded slick patch on the highway.

Steer in the direction of the skid, that’s what you’re supposed to do, he told himself, strangely calm. Somehow he managed to keep his foot off the brake despite all natural inclinations, and watched in quiet horror as car and trailer slid placidly across the empty lane to his right and came to rest, upright and facing forward, in the piled-up snowbank along the shoulder of the road.

He let out his breath slowly, scratched his chin, and gently fed some gas. The spinning wheels made a high-pitched whining sound against the snow. He went nowhere. He was stuck.